Malingering

Malingering

Article excerpt

1.

This city is a map

a point in a map of cities sailing clear off the straight edge of the known, flat world. The idea of infinity is sudden and full of female holes, told to me by the amorphous green knitting of my mother; from the city to the country she wove, a wounded fabric, dropping lives like stitches.

I see: a red bus, a new car, old meat, a fresh apple nested in garbage.

I see: a beat-up woman, gravel winking, cracks skipping and a truck, lumbering, beetle-like, on the brow of the hill.

I see: a bike spinning insect-whirrs of the pavement, energy cast off and grating.

I see: a pram, vulnerable and spiny in thickets of refuse, tangled, born, a baby-thing made silent with embroidery.

One bald beige lid lolling.

A nervous eye.

I see, eye-spy through the knothole fence, a child with red-tongue and spindle legs who grips steers comforts, negotiates pram and doll like a real mother through tin-cans from a wedding voyage, snagged in flaccid loops of garden hose and swallowed by a dull gape of door.

Her mother,

in the gloom, face shadowed arms akimbo over flowered stomach, giving only her body to her assumptions.